Brief news items and worthy reads from around the web:
Classic rock’s high prices and good exposure from ads: AdWeek examined the choices by some of rock’s great icons to license out their songs to marketers. The price tags for this songs are of course high, but there is also an appeal to exposing new audiences to their songs. “It’s next-gen, and they don’t want to be out of it,” Melissa Chester, an executive music producer at BBDO, told AdWeek.
Pandora CFO on repairing licensing relationships: Pandora finance chief Mike Herring, a frequent speaker at investor and tech conferences, talks to the Wall Street Journal about steps he has taken to improve Pandora’s relationship with artists and labels, and to repair misunderstandings about how Internet radio works in the realm of music royalties. [WSJ]
Wonder.fm offers SoundCloud hit discovery: After his We Are Hunted service was bought and eventually shuttered by Twitter, Stephen Phillips has returned with a new music service called Wonder.fm. The program is a simple grid of the top 99 tracks on SoundCloud from the past month, accompanied by a pretty photo of the artist. Click on any of them to hear the song. “My hope is that music fans seeking cool sounds outside the top 40 might find it a really fun app,” Phillips told Complete Music Update.